Wage Earners Draw Irs' Sharpest Looks

April 7, 2002|By David Cay Johnston, New York Times

The government looks for tax cheating by wage earners far more carefully than it looks for cheating by people whose money comes from their own businesses, investments, partnerships and trusts. This is true despite many warnings by federal tax officials that cheating is becoming far more common among the latter group.

Even as Congress finances a crackdown on tax cheating by the working poor, it is appropriating little money to detect abuses by people, usually among the wealthiest, who do not rely entirely on wages for their income.

Executives at the Internal Revenue Service have mentioned this discrepancy in several reports to Congress. They have not focused attention on how little they can do about it. But an examination by The New York Times of IRS statistics including audit rates and staff deployment figures, as well as interviews with current and former IRS officials, shows the agency can identify only a tiny percentage of the cheats and pursue even fewer of them.

That the IRS audits the working poor at a much higher rate than wealthy people has been disclosed before. What has not been discussed is that the agency does not track nonwage income as closely as wage income -- and in some cases does not verify it at all, even as the IRS says that cheating on nonwage income is rising.

The greater scrutiny of wage earners begins with their employers, who must report wages in detail to the Internal Revenue Service on W-2 and 1099 forms. Banks report interest earned on savings accounts and paid on home mortgages.

Congress requires even more of the 19 million Americans who apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a payment from the government of as much as $4,008 for a low-income working family. Many of them are required to produce marriage licenses, school report cards to prove the existence of a child in the home and other evidence.

But a much smaller group of people -- almost all among the wealthiest 5 percent -- are subjected to less rigorous standards. Among them are people who own their own businesses, collect rents from tenants and reap gains on their stocks and other investments, including partnerships.

Business owners and landlords can report whatever they want, with no institution to contradict them. For them, there is no third party to verify what they put on their tax returns.

Investors can also fudge their numbers. That is because brokerage firms are required to report to the IRS only the total amount received when stock or other securities are sold, leaving it to the investor to determine and report how much was taxable profit. To cheat, an investor simply overstates the amount he paid for the security, thus reducing the taxable profit.

When people who know each other conduct private transactions for collectibles and other property, the sales are often never reported.

Even when a third party independently reports a person's income to the IRS -- like income from partnerships, limited liability companies and trusts -- the IRS has never matched these reports to individual tax returns, said Dale Hart, IRS deputy commissioner.

Cheating on partnership income illustrates weaknesses in stopping abusive tax avoidance among the affluent. Three-fourths of partnership income goes to 2 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $200,000 annually.